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If rightwing Twitter could rot your brain, I'd expect Vance to be more affected than Musk.
The drugs aren't helping, but I think the simpler explanation is that Elon has been faking it till he makes it his entire career. Retweeting false information, and coping about Community Notes being gamed isn't actually any different than his MO of making predictions of wild-ass things happening "next year" for years on end, and complaining about the handful of voices calling him out on it a decade later.
Is Vance not pretty heavily rotted from online discourse too? He seems to have gone a deep end in some ways at least.
I saw his interview on Joe Rogan and thought he was someone who could actually be good: a moderating influence on Trump, an adult who can get some things done while being stabilizing in general versus Trump's more insane flips. I really liked his book too, and thought he might have some of the right instincts. I haven't been impressed so far, and his behavior in the Zelensky meeting and in general on social media have been the opposite at least in my perception, it seems to maximize for heat vs light in the real world.
Twitter shitposting seems to be highly contagious in general, with Rubio recently wading in to shout at Poland, which wasn't my idea of diplomacy. Seems like a clown show in general, rather than showing strength as I assume they intend.
I'm really interested in the opinions of others though... what do you all think?
Why do you think this, or Rubio's posting, us caused by Twitter? Was everythibg that made Democrats look bad in your eyes also caused by Twitter?
OP's complaint seems to be about detachment from basic reality, yours is a lot ccloser to just not liking their priorities and policies.
I mean I'm not impressed with Musk, Rubio or Vance on Twitter, and all of them seem a bit deranged on it - they're suffering from brainrot from the medium it seems to me. Though I did include some other points which are more not liking their priorities and policies, some of that also seems to be them playing to the social media crowd - maybe I'm wrong there however.
OP's baseline for "brainrot" is "making a factual statement on how much money you saved the government, and being off by a couple of orders of magnitude", yours is "they're maximizing for heat rather than light". I don't think it's correct to lump these together, and it might even be an instance of generating more heat than light itself.
I think a common sense approach is best here. Rubio , while less then the others , is indeed showing signs of 'brainrot'. https://x.com/marcorubio/status/1898755922492588082 , this is not a serious answer to another politician who is correcting musk's nonsense, this would be considered a bad answer here on the motte , so you can't tell me it's an appropriate response for this level of communication. The US goverment is clearly confused, fanatic and out of control and the evidence is right there , no reason to trip over ourselves with analysis. There are literally hundreds of examples of this. I literally just yesterday saw a goverment official say something like ' trump is the only person in the universe that can solve the ukraine war' , yes he did say ' in the universe' , what the hell is going on? I am not even going to talk about Homan and his insane antics.
The whole thing is more performative then substantial, seems like everyone is trying to show off , with some of them being legitimately insane/incapable.
Unless he's claiming there are aliens, "in the universe" is the same as "in the world". It's just a rhetorical flourish, it doesn't actually mean anything different.
I am aware , that doesn't make it any better though .It is a cartoonishly ridiculous level of ass-licking. I could barely believe what I was hearing , rhetoric like that obviously has no place in a serious discussion. Children speak like that.
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